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To start with, I’d like to talk about some of the pieces of software that I’ve found to be useful so far. I’m a university student so I need quite a range of tools for that, so for those in education you might also be quite interested in it.

LibreOffice – This one is quite a simple one. Not everyone can afford the license for Microsoft Office (I know I can’t! :P) so this is a free alternative. It does most of the same features and costs absolutely nothing, and one of the things I like about it is the ability to add extensions and plugins into it to add more features. There’s quite a big community surrounding this and it’s available for Mac, Windows and Linux so everyone can use it :)

GIMP – Another free tool is GIMP, which acts as a replacement for Adobe Photoshop, yet another tool which is great but costs way too much. It seems that only professionals can afford to buy suites like the one made by Adobe, so this is pretty useful. It once again takes a similar approach and has a powerful extension system, but is free. This is something that I’ve been using quite a lot actually. You can actually find this from most places, but what you should really be looking for is a genuine gimp download.

7-Zip – Windows already has some functionality which helps with this but if you download files from the internet you may notice something called a .zip file. A lot of you probably already know about this but they’re compressed data storage files. You need a program to extract the files out of it so that you can actually use it. You can do this in Windows, but it isn’t that useful. 7-Zip allows you to do much more, and even create your own archives if you want to send them to people.

You can download all of these from softwaredownload247.com if you want to find them all. They’re all pretty useful from what I’ve seen of them :)

Edit: Oh, I also forgot to mention that there are some other useful tools, but for other purposes. Frets on Fire is a pretty fun game that is like Guitar Hero if you’re interested in that sorta thing. You can add songs into it yourself and there’s also a big community surrounding this one, so it’s quite fun to play online against other players. If you have some free time, I recommend that you take a look at this one too ;)